lostcarnival | ⇨ THE ATHENAEUM

Entry tags:

⇨ THE ATHENAEUM

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 47 - Day 58 ish
Where: The Athenaeum
What: The carnival arrives at book world. First week, they'll be performing for magical manifestations of book characters. Second week, it's time to hunt (for books, in the library.) Around Day 58 some stuff will occur.
Warnings: Reading is mandatory.

FAERIE TALES↴

Though the carnival will be performing for its guests in the first week, they are welcome to search the Athenaeum while they are off duty during that time. The manifestations of story characters will be out in full force during performance week, with animals, people, objects, and even locations growing out from various tales. Most are distracting at worst, and will be curious to check out the carnival. Some, however, can be as dangerous as they were in their stories of origin. You know what to do.

► IT'S TIME TO ROLEPLAY: The best way to deal with book ghosts is to follow their narrative to its logical conclusion - turn the tables, work the story so it ends in your favour! Naturalistic and narratively satisfying plotting will have the manifestations following your lead. However, push too hard and introduce too many plot holes, inconsistencies, or illogical plot twists, and they will reject your reality utterly, becoming quite aggressive in the process. You can also use your natural abilities and powers to fight them in a traditional sense, but in the Ringmaster's experience, it's best to fight reality benders by bending reality right back at them. If you aren't careful, it's possible to be dragged fully into a story's reality, and then things get really messed up.

► IT'S ALSO TIME TO READ: The carnival came here for a purpose, and that purpose is to research. Specifically, the Ringmaster is looking for information on the Queen's Miracles - the set of ancient fae artifacts that the Blue Rose is one of. The carnival needs these artifacts to defend itself, but nobody knows where they've been for thousands of years. That's what the books are for. However, nothing is stopping you from pursuing knowledge for personal reasons. The halls are open to your perusal, and only your heart can guide you to the book you truly seek. Check the plot post to see what's allowed, and sign up to find plot info or other important game information below.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Foster is getting the vibe that all the texts they find are going to sound similarly trite.

He fucking hates it.

But okay. Fine. At least it's not just what he's finding, or he really would be out of patience for it.

"Nothing so obvious," he replies in a dour, slightly tedious tone. "Life begets death, death begets life." He gets a little more intense with the next line--

"The sun itself dies at the end of each day, but is... reborn the following dawn." But he doesn't sound very enthusiastic about any of it, except perhaps for the bit about the sun's death.

And the majority of his interest in that is doused almost immediately by it being 'reborn.' That word, from his mouth, drips with contempt.

"...Carly also found something about purging the mortal soul full of light and darkness," he notes, almost as an afterthought.

"I wonder...one of our artifact we're looking for is sun and shade. Perhaps we shouldn't worry if the thing gets broken?" After all, the sun dies but gets reborn, an object is broken but can be fixed. It's an intensely tenuous connection and Strange's face is pure 'I don't know what to think about this' but hey, it's an attempt at a connection.

Carly's info is a bit more directly connected to what he has, so Strange focuses in on that. He sighs, putting his hands in his pockets as he frowns.

"No matter what, it's a pity we haven't found anything yet on what purging the darkness from one's soul actually means. I'd happily be a test subject, I simply want to know about the side effects."

Foster gives him a dim look--not even he can be convinced of that one, Strange.

He would be hard to convince his find and Strange's are connected anyway, though, partially because he doesn't want to; finding information about sun and shade would still be satisfactory to the Ringmaster, but he's ~~delusionally~~ personally certain that the elements of wood and rot are his true purpose here, his heart's path--

And the connection between Strange's verse and Carly's is much more obvious, even if Strange's idea is... not, to him.

"Purge your soul?" He regards the magician askance. "Of what? Wait--" No, even before that--

"You want to know the side effects before you test it on--?"

What's the point of testing it if you already know?

"Of course," Strange responds, as if this is completely obvious. There's a bit of a manic smile on his face as he goes right into discussing the process. "We'd test it on something smaller first. Perhaps one of your undead birds? Or just a bird in general, I'm certain we can find more. And then if purging the darkness somehow kills the bird, we'll realize alright, there's no need to move up to testing it on humans."

This makes logical sense in Strange's mind. He still doesn't know how purging the soul of darkness works and doesn't mind being the human test subject if needed. But it's like the cure for the Prince's poison: use a few undead rats as a test subject before getting a human to chug the nasty drink.

Granted, a fae could supposedly remove the darkness from their heart with ease. The Winter Queen did it. But then again, fae are op and what doesn't kill them might kill a human.

On the one hand, this is an idea Foster can get into--the use of one's self as the ultimate test, the willingness to sacrifice that self for a purpose, to that purpose, regardless of what one's purpose is.

And it's not like Foster didn't start on smaller animals--mice and rats and guinea pigs and rabbits and birds, cats and then dogs, before making the final, precariously-near-to-too-late plunge into its application to himself.

On the other--

"How do you put darkness in the soul of a bird?" Foster wants to know, but immediately hastens to continue: "But if you can, then I'll happily provide you with all the birds you need!"

He can't risk sounding anything less than avidly, ardently, absolutely willing.

"But I'm not so sure it's even just purging darkness. The verse made it sound more... complete, a purge more essential, more vital...!"

"If I was cursed with darkness, it should be easy to find a way to curse something else with darkness." After all, didn't the Ringmaster always go on about how the fae in his world were small fry? If one of them still managed to curse Strange so thoroughly, it should be easy to find a way to curse small animals!

It's a feedback loop of enthusiasm, as Foster's willingness only further boosts Strange's enthusiasm about the whole thing. Hell yeah this is a good plan! And the more they talk about it, the more they'll figure out the holes in the plan! Because despite the fact that he normally rushes into things headfirst and without thinking, Strange knows that he probably should at least attempt to think things over before going headfirst into all this nonsense.

As such, Strange only briefly acknowledges Foster's valid points. He's too hyped up on his own ideas and his own plans. "Then we'll just have to make the darkness more intense. A magical binding or a something utterly damning, for example. Do you think the Ringmaster can curse one of the rats?"

Just asked in an utterly serious manner like this suggestion isn't kind of stupid in the first place.

It's less a matter of Foster believing the Ringmaster could do such a thing and more a question of whether she would. As far as he's concerned, the Ringmaster has sufficient power to do whatever she wants, or nearly enough. She reserves it, though--holds it in confidence until such time as she finds its use explicit--

"You were cursed with darkness," Foster repeats, but instead of sounding dubious, he sounds... interested.

Truth is, a rat's soul is very like a human's, but it's... simpler. A more raw and straightforward thing. He wants to question whether it could hold a meaningful curse, but it is a mortal soul, and that's all the text specified--mortality.

"It's too bad you don't actually know anything about necromancy," he adds--a lament, and he actually means it.

Even if being the only necromancer makes him useful--occasionally, anyway. With soul-based maladies and magics a topic of regular interest, Foster does find himself sporadically offered reasons to keep practising besides boredom... and the lack of another outlet for that feeling.

At Foster's comment, Strange's dislike of talking about necromancy buts right up against his arrogance. There's a brief internal battle before the arrogance wins. There are very few things that piss Strange off more than someone thinking he can't do something. And besides, more and more people are learning about the blood contract quill he has, might as well own up to the creepy magic up front. He gives Foster a frown before launching into a correction.

"I have raised the dead before, you know. The method was crude, a form of blood magic cobbled together during wartime, but it worked."

All talk about him being cursed with darkness is currently ignored as Strange defends himself and his necromancy. Doesn't know anything about necromancy his foot, of course he knows something about necromancy!

Strange really needs to make up his mind about necromancy. When he first met the man, Strange thought he knew so much about necromancy that he could tell Foster what he was doing better--which he later recanted in telling Foster necromancy wasn't his strong suit.

"Every time I say the word 'necromancy,' you have a different take on it," Foster observes, gesturing with one paw. "Let me guess: by 'before,' you mean 'once.'"

He's not aggressive, for once. If anything, he's... taunting?

"Too bad I didn't hold onto that scroll I found about necromancy. Maybe you could have learned something." It's mostly a joke--the methods in that story were vague and unwieldy to the point of being bizarre.

Spitting in the corpse's mouth to permit speech.

One wonders how the mage in that story stumbled on that solution.

There's been a few months since their conversation at the Celebration. During that time, Strange's arrogance and faith in his skills has gone from 'absolutely unbearable' to 'mostly unbearable' after a few months straight of getting dunked on by the fae, Creation and the Void, and then the fae again. Of course he's a little less up his own ass than when they first talked about the subject.

Also, Strange isn't drunk right now. That helps.

Though the mention of a story about necromancy is enough to pique Strange's interest, in the way that learning about magic in general is enough to pique his interest. They can divert the conversation for a bit, right? Right.

"I don't have any use right now for bringing back the dead." That's all Foster and the Ringmaster, he's focused his magic closer to other pursuits. "But, out of curiosity, what did that scroll tell you?"

"It helps to be dying yourself," Foster quips, but for once doesn't have a lot to add. Or he does, but he's still waiting to see if Herbert's 'cure' affects his lifelong atrophy and decay at all--or if the poison injected in his brain is as useless there as it is toxic otherwise.

Which itself doesn't really matter for the purposes of this conversation; even if his purposes no longer require it, everyone else seems to find uses for his necromancy. So he's not stopping now.

It just spares Strange about five solid minutes of ranting about rot.

"A wartime application of necromancy... taking place at the foot of a windmill to make it spookier, I guess. Your typical 'necromancy is bad' story, really. 'I'll never do this again,' etc."

Foster may or may not have come across a lot of that in his search for practical necromancy resources at home. He cocks a back hoof easily, shifting his hip to rest on three legs.

"The mage... Marlin or Marley or whatever, set up beneath some windmills and cut his palm for his blood like an idiot, then it made a big deal about how the dead came back speaking a different language." He's working up to what amounts to the punchline of the whole thing.

"He could have just let his raised lead the way, but instead he.... spat in their mouths to permit them speech. Which is probably someone's kink."

...well fuck.

Strange isn't good at hiding his emotions or hiding his feelings. The more Foster explains about the story, the more obvious it becomes that Strange has something to do with this and the fact that Foster finds this all humorous is making Strange a bit awkward in return.

"They were speaking the language of Hell," Strange explains looking intensely like he needs a drink (or maybe twelve). "We needed them to speak Neapolitan so that we'd be able to find the cannons. And it was Merlin, not Marley. The army called me Merlin."

Surprise, it's about him.

Obvious to someone else, maybe. Foster's best guess would be that Strange really is that squeamish about necromancy, and his opinion of people getting uptight about that is generally uncharitable.

It's not until Strange out and says it that Foster gets it, and when he does, he stares at Strange for one, two... maybe even three entire seconds.

And then he busts out laughing.

He avoids touching Strange at all by bracing himself against a shelf with one shoulder and paw, but--

Well, Strange has the time to get a word in before Foster does, if he needs to.

Strange is trying his hardest to remain calm and collected. But he can't shake the feeling that Foster is laughing at him directly and laughing at his magic. That pisses him off something fierce. So, Strange simply glares at Foster as he crosses his arms over his chest and starts to explain.

"In my world, magic hasn't been practiced for hundreds of years before Norrell and I sought to restore it. Considering that there were hardly any books of magic or established spells I could draw upon, I think I did a damn good job with the resurrections!"

It was a spell cobbled together from rumors, stories of old, and the inherent power of blood magic but it still worked.

"Mine too!" Foster replies almost... eagerly, although his world does have a slight head start on Strange's. Long enough for necromancy to become illegal, not long enough for the oldest to forget when magic wasn't.

"So, how long did it take you to use that hand again? You don't strike me as appreciating pain.... really, you're lucky you got your use of it back at all."

Foster knows stunningly little about the structure of bodies for someone who spends so much time around them, but (in)convenience and vulnerability to infection aside, the inside of a palm contains a lot of essential nerves. He takes one step forward, eyes bright; his eyelids drop just slightly, though, and turns his head aside with a smile.

"I suppose invention means no one can stop you from indulging whatever other tastes you have."

Strange is still a bit huffy and pouty as he looks over at Foster with a frown. "It took around a week to recover. Obviously, it's healed properly." And Strange puts his hand up and wiggles his fingers to show Foster what's intensely obvious: Strange's hand works just fine.

He pauses for a moment, before continuing to talk shop. He doesn't see himself using necromancy ever again (and certainly not back at home, as Norrell would probably have his head)...but there's no shame in talking about these things.

"Really, the biggest problem was finding a way to make them dead again. I think Wellington settled on cremation." They locked the corpses in the windmill and set the windmill on fire. "How do you deal with the bodies?"

Foster regards Strange's palm with something resembling polite disinterest until Strange picks the subject up again, this time with a question--

And what would to an actual moral person be an absolutely horrifying admission. Foster, however, starts losing it again, laughing--of all the heinous solutions Strange could have engineered, the one he chose is truly spectacular.

"Without regraving them?" He manages, between peals of laughter--and with different smile, wider but more deprecating in some direction or another. "And they call me sick--"

At least he gets around to answering as he sobers.

"Mmmm. You remember the rats, don't you? The easiest way is to cut them again with the blade used to raise them. Burning works, but they will feel it." At least where he's from. That's why reanimated bodies are more widely accepted, though it's still illegal to perform on the human dead.

"There are rituals... the one I use involves gravesoil, glass, and seawater." A pause. Then, blandly: "Or, you can just kill the necromancer."

Surprising no one, Strange doesn't take this conversation well. He thought Foster was simply a weirdo, but now his opinion's shifting a bit towards Foster being a patronizing asshole. Didn't he just say the necromancy on his world was barely developed? How the hell was he supposed to know about regraving or whatever to begin with?

He crosses his arms over his chest as he gives Foster a glare that obviously says Strange isn't too pleased with the way this conversation is going.

"Obviously I'm not going to kill the necromancer, I am the necromancer." Said in a tone of voice that implies 'you dipshit.' "Besides, killing the enchanter isn't a foolproof method to dispel any previously cast magic."

"It works for necromancy because you're part of the tether," Foster replies, spreading his paws as though a string were stretched between them. He doesn't argue with being treated like a dense motherfucker--there's a light in his eyes, though, as he leans forward a little to encourage Strange in that.

"The combination of soul and flesh that with your blood and your spell bound them back to the body past... do you understand?"

Fosters assumption is that Strange's displeasure originates on moral grounds, and he's a little perplexed that Strange brought back the dead without being prepared for the consequences of his role in it.

But from what Foster's read and heard, it sounds like Strange didn't even try--just skipped from 'how' straight to making a windmill bonfire. And then there was the time Strange tried to bleed his massive rats to death...

"It's why the original blade works--its purpose completed, it's still tied to the original magic, and can be used to unraise what has by it been wrought. I... discovered this myself, actually--the seawater ritual was expensive for requiring gold, and... uh, the amount by which I would need it was.... a lot."

Foster hesitates to admit the amount of DIY involved in his practise, outside of his breach of the hard limit, but it's for a good cause. 'A good cause' being defined here as 'prove himself as right as possible before he loses Strange's audience.'

The book skips over a few things like 'Strange trying to use other magic to rekill the corpses' and 'Strange straight up shooting one of the corpses in the chest' for the sake of narrative flavor. Scribe didn't want to get bogged down with details or something like that. But considering that windmill bonfire happened about a day after the necromancy, it still wasn't much time.

"Well, I raised the dead in wartime. We were on the continent, there wasn't any chance of getting gold and we were inland enough that there wasn't any chance of getting seawater." He says this in a matter of fact tone, like Foster knows exactly what Strange is talking about when he says 'the continent.' He's still a little defensive and still a little pissy but Strange is at least continuing the conversation for now.

"The blade was just something I borrowed from one of the officers. There wasn't anything symbolic about it like there would be for other magical items."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

⇨ THE ATHENAEUM

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

I'm so sorry

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject